by Alex Archer
Chapter 27
The guards wore their bulky black uniforms and helmets, and carried weapons slung by straps they kept tense with thumbs hooked through them to prevent the steel-shod butts of their machine pistols from pounding their kidneys. They ran straight toward the unlikely pair, the rogue scientist and the tall young woman in hiking clothes.
Annja began to curl her hand. "Wait," Bergstrom said conversationally.
The two black-clad operators trotted by without a glance at them.
"Quickly, now," he said. "Our research led us out of our depth. Experimenting with DNA, we found it easier to breed hybrid animals than we'd dreamed. Controlling the breaches was the problem. Among other things, it has proved difficult to confine the beast to the facility."
He sighed. His exertion had him breathing heavily. He was also limping slightly, favoring his right leg. "In some cases there have been...controlled breaches. Or at least deliberate ones."
"Why?"
"In part to test our ability to control the creatures themselves. These experiments have not produced many positive results. Also, in order to test our ability to control the release of potentially damaging information, and manage public perceptions of it."
"You mean you were putting innocent people at risk to test how well you could lie to them?" Annja said.
"Yes. We are not the first. Nor the only. We will not be the last."
"That wasn't what made you decide to blow the whistle?"
"Alas, no."
"What could, if not something like that?"
"The fear that we are threatening the fabric of reality itself. Between Hanratty's bland ambition and that psychotic Thompson's growing influence over him, all my warnings were ignored. And I became increasingly desperate. If those creatures begin breeding in the wild..." He shuddered.
"It's one thing to joke about creating the means of destroying the world, and quite another to confront the immediate risk of actually doing so."
"What about the Holy Child sightings?" Annja asked.
"I don't know. That had nothing to do with us," he said.
She frowned and wanted to question that. But approaching a cross passage, he raised a hand to stop her.
"And now time and answers are alike at an end. What remains is action. There may yet be time."
"To prevent what?"
"The world being overrun with deadly monsters," he said.
She looked at him. The alarms continued their cacophony. The corridors were crowded with excited technicians. No one paid the least attention to them.
She wondered, briefly, what was really going on. What did "containment breach" actually mean? But she took Bergstrom at his word. She had little choice.
"All right," she said. "Action I can do. What now?"
"Around this corner is the entrance to a control station. It will likely be guarded inside and out. You must get me inside at all costs."
"And then?"
"You must get out of this facility," he said, "and as far away as you can, as fast as you can."
She drew the sword to her. Bergstrom took a step back.
"Marvelous," he breathed. "What a terrible shame I shall never get to study the means whereby you do that!"
She put the back of her shoulders to the wall. It felt cold and hard through the fabric of her shirt and jacket. She took a deep breath and spun into the cross corridor.
A score of people occupied the passage. They moved in both directions in clumps. She had no idea where they were going or what they were doing.
A pair of men in black stood thirty yards down from her. They had MP-5s in their gloved hands. Their body language suggested they were distrustful of the technicians leavened with lab-coated scientists.
The one farthest from Annja noticed her first. He stepped into the middle of the passage, shouldering his weapon. Startled technicians began to part, screaming, to either side.
They didn't move quickly enough. He opened fire. The sound suppressor kept the burst from being intolerably loud in the confines of the corridor. But it still sounded, like an unmuffled motorcycle engine.
Some of the screams went up in timbre – or stopped. The guard was spraying bullets toward Annja without caring who or what was in the way.
She was running but not fast enough to give her any decent chance of closing with him before he put a bullet into her, even though the panicked technicians made her a harder target. The guard's companion turned and began shooting from the hip, right into the crowd, evoking more screams and causing two technicians to fall right in front of her.
On impulse she jumped. She straightened her body so that, just for an instant, she flew nearly horizontal. She lunged with the sword. She felt the blade bite deep, heard a hoarse cry of pain.
She landed heavily, pulling the sword with her as she fell.
The man had collapsed, his weapon stilled. She wheeled to find the other shooter, hunched in pain, the victim of a ricocheted bullet.
She swung her right foot and kicked away his weapon. He didn't attempt to stop her.
Some of the fleeing personnel had dropped to the floor. Now they were picking themselves up – those that could. Several lay moaning. At least four lay without moving or making any noise at all.
Through the wounded people Dr. Bergstrom made his way. He was walking bent over, clutching the right side of his substantial belly with his hand. The shirt beneath was dyed bright pink.
"You're hit," Annja said.
"I'll live," he replied conversationally enough, although his hairline was beaded with sweat. "Long enough at least."
She found herself standing outside a sealed door. There was a keypad with a slot mounted next to it. It offered nothing she could use.
"What now?" she asked as Bergstrom limped up.
He raised a hand holding a plastic card toward the pad.
"No biometrics?" she asked as he swiped its magnetic strip down the slot.
"No money," he said. "Our budget was far from unlimited. Our security was assumed."
He punched a quick five-number combination. "Get ready," he said, through now gritted teeth.
The door slid open. A guard stood there with a Beretta in his hand.
Annja head-butted him in the face. He staggered back clutching his flattened nose. A second guard was fumbling the strap of an MP-5 off his shoulder. He never got the chance to finish.
A technician in powder blue rose from a swivel chair in front of a bank of monitors. He stared in horror at Annja, standing with the sword still in hand. Then his eyes slid past her.
"Dr. Bergstrom!" he exclaimed.
"Get out, Yee," Bergstrom said. His teeth were individually outlined in scarlet. The technician paled as he saw this, then darted past him and out into the corridor. As he did, a fresh spate of screams wafted in past him.
"It has begun," Bergstrom said, leaning with a hand on the table in front of the console and frowning at the monitors. Whether he referred to what he saw or the terrified cries from outside the small room Annja couldn't tell.
He looked at her. His features were rigidly held against the pain of his wound. She guessed the anesthetic effects of wound shock were already beginning to wear through.
"You must go now, as well," he said. "Turn right, down the corridor for forty yards. Left into the stairwell. Go up two flights. It will put you in a truck tunnel that leads to the outside. Remember what I told you – fast and far!"
Chapter 28
A black thing flew level, straight for her eyes. Black wings seemed to span the corridor. All she could make out of the head were the two huge red eyes that shone upon her like malevolent lamps.
Annja screamed in response. She met it with a wild forehand slash. The blade caught the left eye, extinguishing its glare. She sheared clear through the beast, her blade exiting just behind the right wing. It fell thrashing and shrieking.
She ran, vaulting writhing black ruin. Before her a creature the size and shape of a natural wolf, but with a co
at of that light-sucking black, looked up from the torn-out throat of the hapless Yee with red, glowing eyes. She raised her sword. But a second creature, longer and leaner and feline in outline and sinuous motion, attacked the wolf from behind. Squalling and snarling, they turned into a furious ball of fangs and claws. She ran past them.
Without looking back she sprinted to the door to the stairs, yanked it open and went rabbiting up.
The truck tunnel was all Bergstrom had suggested and more. It was another glass-walled circular bore big enough to accommodate a full semitrailer rig.
Annja began to realize how the huge facility was supplied. The tunnel was so wide that various crates and containers were stacked high to either side of the level floor, or roadway. Two hundred yards away she could see double concrete doors illuminated by the jittering light of fluorescents.
There was just one thing wrong with the tunnel that Annja could see. It was full of screaming red-eyed men fighting screaming red-eyed monsters.
The battle lines were anything but clear-cut. The black monsters seemed as ferociously – or desperately – eager to battle one another as the black-clad humans. The humans, meanwhile, seemed almost as inclined to turn their guns, knives and fists on one another as on the animal horrors.
Guns flashed and roared. Men howled as their flesh was torn by great taloned paws. Empty cartridge cases crashed on fused stone, adding a madly whimsical wind-chime effect to the aural horror show.
Annja climbed to the top of a stack of crates. On the far side a security operator stood firing down into the melee. As she moved toward him he was distracted. Two wolflike creatures seized him by an arm and a leg and commenced a snarling tug-of-war.
With a shrill scream something glided toward her from the ceiling. She ducked out of its way. It wheeled, buffeted her with its wings. She took a stunning blow across the face, reeled. She felt her right heel come down on nothing, just caught herself with the corrugated toe of her shoe.
A wing struck her again. She windmilled her arms briefly. Her balance training saved her; she caught herself, lashed out with the sword as she moved toward the middle of the flat upper surface. The blade slashed a leading edge of wing. The creature recoiled with a shriek. Annja ran the sword through its belly.
She twisted her blade and tore it free. The winged attacker fell brokenly to the floor.
Bullets smashed into crates below Annja. She dropped flat. More bullets cracked over her head to punch holes through the plastic walls.
She crawled across more containers. She could see a smaller door beside the outsize truck doors. She began to hope she might see the sun again.
As she reached the end of the row she jumped down. As she hit the ground she encountered an eight-foot apelike creature. She ran straight at the monster, which seemed momentarily stunned by her appearance out of nowhere. She cut it across the belly, left and right then darted past.
A man with his helmet askew confronted her with a mad eye glaring through the combat sights of his shouldered MP-5. "You bitch," he shouted. "I'll – "
She raced past him to his left. As she did she snatched his loose-hanging sling with her left hand. Her momentum as she passed tore the weapon right out of his gloved hands and cracked him sharply across the face. She pulled him over backward to slam him heavily on his back on the stone. The thin rubber mat on the walkway did nothing to cushion his landing.
The air was knocked out of him but his helmet protected his head. He wasn't even stunned. As he moved to rise, one of the wolflike creatures pounced and pinned the man's lower leg between black, slavering jaws.
Annja reached the door with a last grateful bound. Her lungs burned so fiercely she wondered if some toxic fumes had been released. She reached for the door handle.
There wasn't one. There was another alphanumeric keypad. She was trapped without the code at the mouth of a seething bottle of raging violence.
A low sobbing sound, deceptively soft, made Annja spin away from the door.
A trio of catlike monsters approached her, slinking with their bristling belly fur almost brushing the tunnel floor. Their fangs gleamed against their black faces. Great, she thought, they're smart enough to flank me.
Her best shot was to try to race past one and disable it with a sword-cut. But that would mean charging right back into the midst of the frenzied man-and-monster scrum. She steeled herself to do it anyway.
Just then the smaller door blew off its hinges behind her with an end-of-the-world crash.
Chapter 29
Dr. Nils Bergstrom looked away from his monitor at last. Mad Jack Thompson crawled, broken and bloodied, toward him. With arms outstretched, desperately clinging to the sides of the door, he screamed in terror. A black immensity filled the doorway behind him, trying to drag him out into the corridor.
Thompson's mad eyes met Bergstrom. "Help me," the security chief groaned. "Please."
Bergstrom's smile was ghastly red. "As you wish."
Turning back to his keyboard, he pressed Enter.
****
Annja staggered from the force of the explosion. The door flew off to one side, smashing to the floor ten feet away.
Annja turned and was through the door like a shot. Outside, the sun had already dropped behind the high peaks to the west, filling the valley with purple-gray shadow. She ran as fast as she could, down a road graveled with crushed white pumice toward a tree-lined ridge a quarter mile away. Midway between the door and the ridge a familiar figure stood and cast away an antitank missile launcher. Annja ran toward him with great bounds.
"How did you know I'd come out this way?" she asked Father Godin, slowing as she came up to him.
"I had help," he said. Though he smiled his voice was ragged. He bent forward to unlimber a heavy rifle from his back. "Mad Jack called about the security breach. He thought I might come and help out my old comrade. I did, but not the comrade he'd hoped."
She stopped to breathe hard and glance back at the exit. The great gray doors seemed to have been carved in a hillside, out of sight beneath a jutting slab of what looked like and might have been natural rock. Black shapes poured out through the lesser opening beside them.
"Run," Godin suggested. He pulled a long, heavy-looking weapon to his shoulder. It roared like a cannon and rocked the well-braced Jesuit back on his heels when he fired it.
An impressive tongue of orange flame licked toward the animals in the twilight. Several fell howling and snapping at themselves.
Annja fled to the top of the slope, stopped, turned back. Godin was laboring behind her, face ashen. "They're gaining," he said.
A wolf shape bounded up the hill almost on his heels. He turned, dropped to one knee, bringing the rifle to his shoulder again. When he fired, the rifle's muzzle was barely a yard from its target.
The black canine shape fell thrashing and voicing its horribly human cries. Annja stared wide-eyed.
The sword sprang into Annja's hand. She moved past Godin and struck down another monster. The flat skull split.
Annja braced herself and prepared to face whatever might come next.
Suddenly she saw a shaft of intolerably white light thrust upward into a sky of deepening blue from a ridge a thousand feet beyond the entrance to the hidden complex.
She grabbed Godin and flung him to the ground. She landed hard on top of him. She hoped it didn't hurt him half as much as it did her. He wasn't looking good.
An immense white glare washed everything out as Annja buried her face in Godin's clerical collar and squeezed her eyes tight. The earth shook as the underground facility imploded.
As quickly as it started, it was over. The valley seemed plunged into stygian darkness as Annja opened eyes that swam with afterimage.
"What's that smell?" she asked.
The priest's hands beat at the back of her jacket. "You. You're on fire."
She rolled off him and squirmed around on her back like a dog, hoping the autumn grass retained enough moisture from the recent
snowfall that she could smother the fire before it really caught.
Godin had hauled himself to his feet. He reached down and helped pull her upright. Her heart jumped to see his old familiar grin.
But her joy was short-lived. The skin of his face was gray, grayer than the light could account for, and seemed to sag.
Old soldier that he was, he conscientiously reslung his rifle. "I'm surprised your lovely hair did not catch fire," he said.
"Me, too. The backs of my hands and my neck sure feel sunburned, though. I hope we didn't just take a lethal dose of radiation, after all that."
"The good Lord willing," Godin said.
She frowned over his shoulder. "Why are we casting a shadow," she said, "on a south-facing hill?"
He lifted his chin. "Look behind you."
She did.
A thousand yards away a great circular hole gaped in the top of what had been a ridge. A beam of white shot up into the sky like a colossal spotlight.
"The earth has fused to glass," Godin said. "It still glows white from the heat."
She shook her head. She could hardly believe what had happened. Much less that it was, at last, over.
"The creatures?" she asked.
"Dead," he said. "Along with any people who were in there."
A sudden coughing fit doubled him over. She held him as his body shook.
"We have to get you to a doctor," she said. "Where's your SUV?"
"It is parked just over this hill." Bracing himself with a hand on his knee, he handed her the keys. "You will please drive. But not to a doctor. It is much too late for that, you see."
****
The story came out as she raced east.
As she drove higher and higher into the Sangre de Cristos on the east side of the river, she crossed the line of darkness and then stayed just above it. Down below where the exit from the underground lab had been, with mountains rising hard to the west, evening came early. On the western face of the peak day lingered far longer.